Aging planes and helicopters are often referred to as “legacy aircraft.” For purpose of the description herein, legacy aircraft include airplanes and helicopters that are deployed in the field with existing equipment and this equipment generally has a fixed architecture and fixed functionality. For example, in many field deployed aircraft, the cockpits contain conventional gauges and instruments to display information to the pilot and/or other crew members (e.g., flight and engine gauges and instruments, including, for example, altimeters, airspeed indicators, turn and bank indicators, compasses, vertical speed indicators and gyros, attitude instruments, fuel gauges, engine performance gauges and the like). Although each of these devices is adapted to present valuable information to the flight crew, each has a single purpose and do not have interactive functionality. Some aircraft include a television monitor for viewing images derived from a video signal generated by a camera mounted to the aircraft or a store that is releasable from the aircraft.
It has been found that legacy military aircraft do not have cockpit devices that provide the pilot and/or cockpit crew with suitable graphical displays, data acquisition and processing functionality, and a human-machine interface (HMI) to maximize the mission and/or combat fighting capability of the cockpit crew. One notable feature that is missing from the aircraft is the display of moving maps that can show enemy, friendly and neutral party positions and/or flight plan waypoints. Also missing is integrated networked communication with a command and control facility to update mission information seamlessly with avionics information from the aircraft itself.
Unfortunately, retrofitting aging military aircraft to include enhanced display and operational functionality has presented numerous challenges. These challenges are pronounced when upgrading the cockpit to include enhanced user interactive assemblies. In particular, space in the cockpit is limited by the presence of existing equipment. In addition, the existing wiring leading to the cockpit instrumentation panel has a fixed arrangement and limited data availability at the cockpit instrument panel since computer assisted processing of data and signals, if carried out, is not performed by devices in the cockpit instrument panel. Rather, processors are located in other locations of the aircraft and wires carrying only instrument driver signals are run to the cockpit instrument panels.
In view of the foregoing, the conventional approach to upgrading cockpit instrumentation is to replace a selected instrument panel component(s), the wiring running to the component(s) and the associated signal processing device(s) that is located outside of the instrument panel. As can be appreciated, such an endeavor involves significant overhaul of the aircraft. The aircraft must be taken out of service for an extended period of time. Also, considerable retraining of cockpit personnel may be needed to use the new cockpit instruments.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art for an improved interactive device that can be efficiently integrated into legacy cockpit instrument panels.